A couple of weeks ago, I posted that John Lam had announced a binary release of IronRuby. So, I downloaded the zip file and extracted it to the root of my C drive. That created a folder called IronRuby on my C drive containing all the IronRuby goodness. In the IronRuby folder, there’s a bin folder in which is ir.exe, so I added C:\IronRuby\bin to my system PATH variable. I opened a command window and typed ir and saw this:

Now that I had IronRuby running, I did the obvious stuff – putting Hello World, adding some numbers and so on. Next, I tried calling .NET from IronRuby. I typed the following lines into the console;

As an architect, you’ll be concerned with a number of qualities that you need to ensure your systems, applications, services and infrastructure have. I use PASSME as a handy mnemonic to remember the most common of these qualities (performance, availability, security, scalability, maintainability and extensibility.) It’s fairly common to use the shorthand "ility" to refer to any of these qualities. When making architectural decisions, you will be keenly aware which ility you are trading for which other ility. A key ility is affordability. Most of us do not treat money as an infinite resource. However, when it comes to energy consumption, there are many among us who do assume there is an infinite supply. Pretty soon if not already, energy consumption and environmental impact are going to become an ility – and a very important one.

Via the ever interesting FlowingData, I discovered this visualisation in the New York Times of medals won by country. There’s a slider that lets you select which Olympics and a choice between a ranking view and a geographic view. Selecting a country will show you the medals won by that country in that Olympics. This is an interesting and engaging way of presenting the medal data. I wonder how the results from this year’s Olympics will look.

This week, I noticed on RubyInside that there’s a new gem called HTTParty that simplifies calling APIs over HTTP. Since this is exactly what I have been doing with Twitter and SSDS I thought I’d have a look at it. First port of call is the example on RubyForge. There’s some more examples on github – the Twitter example is here.

The next step is to take the Twitter client I wrote before and refactor it to use HTTParty. Here’s the resulting code:

And it all works – apart from a few of the usual timeouts and grumbles from Twitter. Less code and simpler code. This time around I’m using pp (pretty-printer) to format the output – this gives a good view of what HTTParty is returning. My next step with HTTParty is to use it for the SSDS code I wrote.